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7 Steps To Your 80:20 Search Engine Solution
80% of The Results in 20% Of The Time © 2003 by Robert Hawkins rob@moneymakingbusinesstips.com
It's no secret that search engine optimisation can be a time-consuming activity.
In order to stop it taking over your life, you need an efficient method that gets you most of the benefits - quickly.
You may be familiar with Pareto's Principle, also known as "the 80:20 rule" - which broadly states that in most things, there's an approach that gets you 80% of the results in 20% of the time.
Well, this is your 80:20 search engine routine (alright, put your calculator away, it might not be 80% - Pareto's rule actually says "A minority of the input produces the majority of results" - we're definitely talking about the majority of the benefit in the minimum time, here).
Keywords
1. Keyword Selection Good selection of keywords is the most critical part of your search engine strategy. You need keywords with a good level of traffic and tightly targeted relevancy to what you offer on your site. This way, you can get plenty of visitors who are actively seeking exactly what you have to offer.
Here's how to decide which keywords you should use. Go to Overture, and use the free Search Term Suggestion. Here's the link: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
Enter a keyword you know is relevant to your site. The Suggestion Tool will return a list of related keywords showing how many times each of those keyword phrases has been searched on in the last month. Pick solid, relevant keyword phrases from amongst those with the higher numbers of searches.
Put your chosen search terms into a list, with each keyword phrase separated by a comma, up to 255 characters total. You will be using this list in your META tags below.
2. Keyword Density Fit your keywords into natural sounding sentences on your page. The nearer the top of the page, the more weight the engines will apply.
Keyword density refers to the number of time a keyword appears in each one hundred words on the page. You're aiming for a keyword density of around 3%. I get this figure in seconds from my text editor software.
I use NoteTab Pro which is a terrific editor for all kinds of HTML work, and also general text work. You can find NoteTab Pro at www.notetab.com - and they even have a free version called NoteTab Lite, which has pretty much everything you need.
3. Keyword Links If you can, you should also include keyword links in natural sentences, as this is really favored by search engines. An example of how you could do this would be to link keywords to glossary pages which explain the term in simple English.
HTML
4. META tags You need META tags for each page
Title - appears at the top of a browser window when your page is viewed. Use a brief and accurate sentence about your site, using your number one keyword phrase if possible.
Keywords - your list as arrived at above, all on one line, words separated by spaces and phrases separated by commas.
Description - no more than 200 characters. This is what will be seen by people using search engines, so it needs to both read well and make use of keywords. It must 'entice' a viewer to want to click through to your site.
It can be difficult to reconcile these sometimes conflicting requirements. If in doubt, come down on the side of marketing! It does you no good to get a good search engine listing at the expense of a compelling description -because nobody will click through to your site.
The META tags go inbetween the <HEAD> tags. Here's how:
<HEAD> <TITLE>"YourTitle Here"</TITLE> <META NAME=keywords CONTENT="Your Keywords Here"> <META NAME=description CONTENT="Your Description Here"> <META NAME="robots" content="index, follow"> </HEAD>
You will see that I have added one more META tag after 'description' to encourage the search engines to follow the links you are going to put on your page in a minute.
5. H1 tags H1 tags are considered important by the Search Engines. The default font size is big, but you can get the best of both worlds by using an H1 tag to get the desired effect and then use a <FONT> tag to bring the text size down again
For example, you might use an H1 tag for a SubHead like this: <H1><FONT FACE="arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif" SIZE="2">Your Keyword Filled SubHead Text Here</FONT></H1>
6. Image ALT tags Image ALT tags are used to display text while an image loads, or instead of an image if the viewer's browser has images turned off. The use we are interested in is to get more keywords into your page.
So, you should use an ALT tag for every image you use and you can also put 'invisible' images on your page specially to use the ALT tags.
To do this, create a transparent GIF image, 2 pixels x 1 pixel in size. This has no effect on your page, it is not visible to your visitor, but it is a very effective aid in getting search engine traffic. Don't use 1x1 images, some search engines are getting wise to this.
The first ALT tag on your page should repeat the text you use for your 'description' META tag, because some search engines ignore the META tags and take text from the beginning of your page.
Insert a graphic as the first line of HTML in the <BODY> section like this:
<BODY><img src="/clear.gif" width="1" height="2" border="0" alt="your description here">
Other ALT tags should contain a list of your keywords.
7. Link all your pages Links to other pages on your site are doubly beneficial.
They are favored by the engines and they also provide a route for the search engines to find and index your other pages - each of which gives you another chance to score on different keywords.
Here's how you create 'invisible links' to your other pages.
At the top of your web page, after the </HEAD> tag, list all the other web pages on your site, like this:
<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage2.html"></a> <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage3.html"></a> <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage4.html"></a>
etc etc. There is no text between the <a href> and </a> tags, so nothing will appear on your page, but the search engines will still find, index and follow your links.
There are a thousand other things you can do in pursuit of the Holy Grail of search engine optimisation. But a few short minutes of work as described above will get you most of the benefit in minimal time.
Sounds good to me!
Rob Hawkins is an online and offline entrepreneur whose marketing methods currently bring in 7 figures each year. To get Rob's FREE money-making business tips... Click Here Now
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